A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya Raises $5.5M for Hands-On Music Apps
A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya has raised a $5.5 million pre-seed round to build small apps that let users play with sounds and vocals. The backers include Mantis VC, SV Angel, Boxgroup, Quiet Capital, ERA, Common Metal, Gold House, Liquid 2 Ventures, Breakers VC and Systemic Ventures TechCrunch.
The company was started by Mauhan M Zonoozy, former head of innovation at Spotify. Zonoozy left Spotify in 2024. He previously founded Bubbl, a startup for clipping and remixing video, which was acquired by Cricket Media. Dawn Ostroff, former Spotify chief content and advertising business officer, has joined as an advisor.
The company calls itself a music software label. It releases experiments the way a label releases singles from an album. The company says that pace is why it has put out several narrow, hands-on tools instead of one large platform.
Speed Surfer is a Chrome extension that changes the speed and filter of audio in a browser window. Usersound is a website for making an audio username, with each letter mapped to a note. Stacks is a stem player, meaning a player that splits a song into separate layers such as vocals or drums, where users make mixes by switching bars on or off in a 3x3 grid. Drops is an app where users place plaques to deflect falling marbles, and each deflection makes a musical note. Sampler is a website that turns YouTube videos into music samplers using beats from different parts.
bop is the current focus. It is the company's iOS app, earlier described as a pocket DJ for mixing, mashing and messing with music. Users place instruments and effects in a grid to make mixes of a base song. They can adjust tempo, which is the speed of the track, add one-time effects, and export mixes to TikTok or Instagram.
The team is working on a multiplayer version of bop for remixing with others. It also plans a musical sandbox mixer for playing with music-making elements, including creating instruments. Zonoozy said the company chose not to build AI into every part. The model is direct manipulation, with hands-on controls and no prompt or text box between listener and sound. Stems, grids, tempo controls and export paths are standard building blocks, here made into consumer tools with short learning curves.
The broader context here is a split in music software. Much of it in the last two years has centered on generation, where you describe a track and receive a track. A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya is trying a different loop, closer to instruments and games than to waiting for a file to render. Play comes before output. Changes are heard right away. Failure is cheap and often funny.
In my view, that matches how listening already changed. My kids grew up with production tools that an earlier generation would have needed a studio to use. They treated remixing, speeding up clips and swapping stems as normal listening, not specialist skills. Export to TikTok or Instagram formalizes what they did with screen capture. Reducing delay between idea and sound does more for engagement than adding model capacity behind a prompt.
Worth flagging for what comes next, the risks are practical. Small single-purpose apps lose users fast. Retention will depend on catalog, rights, and whether multiplayer remixing builds lasting network effects or short novelty sessions. A sandbox with user-created instruments adds questions around moderation, storage and interface complexity. Shipping small tools is straightforward. Keeping a label-like pace without splitting the audience is harder.
Stepping back to look at the whole picture, the early shape is coherent. One founder brings innovation work and short-form remixing. One advisor brings knowledge of content licensing and advertising at scale. The portfolio tests separate ideas about control, identity and social creation. If one experiment holds attention, bop gives the company a place to bring it together.
